A New Era of Workplace Communications: Will You Lead Or Be Left Behind?
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A NEW ERA OF WORKPLACE COMMUNICATIONS: WILL YOU LEAD OR BE LEFT BEHIND? A No Jitter Industry Insights Report Sponsored by Executive Summary As companies look to institute new strategies for business communications, team messaging and collaboration applications are increasingly becoming important elements of a broader strategy. Results from the No Jitter 2018 Team Collaboration Survey bear this out. Of the 160 primarily U.S.-based enterprise IT professionals who participated in the survey, more than 95% say team messaging and collaboration apps are a necessary component of their future communications strategy. Forty-one percent of respondents were from companies with 1,000+ employees, 43% were from companies with between 100 and 999 employees, and 16% were from companies with fewer than 100 employees. Table of Contents Anytime, Anywhere, On Any Device . 3 Collaborative Communications . 4 Team Messaging: Core to the Future of the Digital Workplace . 5 Building a Blueprint for Collaborative Communications . 6 An All-in-One Experience . 9 About RingCentral . 9 A NEW ERA OF WORKPLACE COMMUNICATIONS: WILL YOU LEAD OR BE LEFT BEHIND? 2 Anytime, Anywhere, On Any Device The way we work has changed — certainly in the last decade, but especially so within the last few years with the rise of the “anytime, anywhere, on any device” business mandate of always-on global companies. Today’s knowledge workers are more distributed, highly mobile, and expect to have communications and collaboration capabilities at their fingertips. But the expectations are changing: being able to shoot off a text, send an email, or ring a business colleague from a smartphone no longer suffices. Employees don’t just want to be reachable; they want the same rich experiences on their mobile devices as they can get on their desktops or in a conference room — and they want a consistent user experience across devices and communication modes. Given the mishmash of applications at their disposal for communicating, many find achieving this singular experience but a pipe dream. It’s not uncommon for employees today to find themselves continuously jumping from one app to the next — video conferencing for this meeting, Web conferencing for that one, team messaging with this project group, and email exchanges with that one. Having to use all these various apps throughout the workday, however, is creating challenges for both employees and businesses: Loss of Worker Productivity — Having to jump from one communications app into another is no small bother, as a recent global survey of 2,000 knowledge workers across all industries found (“From Workplace Chaos to Zen,” CITE Research, March 2018). In the survey, 70% of respondents said communications volume is a challenge to getting basic work tasks done. Existing communications tools only worsen the problem: In the same survey, nearly as many respondents said they toggle between different apps 10 times an hour. As further evidence of the chaos, consider results from the No Jitter 2018 Team Collaboration Survey. In this survey, enterprise IT professionals who are responsible for evaluating and/or making strategic technology decisions for their organizations indicated that the overwhelming majority of their workers use disparate solutions for audio calling/ conferencing (81%), video conferencing (83%), content sharing (86%), and messaging/chat apps (88%). App Overload » Users toggle between different apps 10 times an hour (CITE Research) » Most workers use separate apps for voice calling, conferencing, video, content sharing, and messaging/chat (No Jitter 2018 Team Collaboration Survey) A NEW ERA OF WORKPLACE COMMUNICATIONS: WILL YOU LEAD OR BE LEFT BEHIND? 3 Fractured Workforce/Loss of Innovation — The inability for users to collaborate from within a single, unified solution creates unnecessary barriers and hinders effective teamwork. Teams bring in their own tools of choice, exacerbating the problem — for example, engineering works in one collaborative environment and product management in another, with an inability to share easily between these tools. Unfortunately, jumping from one communications environment to another essentially slows the conversation down to a crawl. For example, two employees use email to discuss a project and share files. As they move to a phone conversation, each has to individually search for and share additional files to support the discussion, which they then store in their own repositories. When they decide to open up the discussion to others via an online meeting, for example, new participants need to be brought up to speed on previous discussions. Files need to be shared once again. As employees move through their work day, the same process repeats itself time and again. A lack of persistent context and content severely restricts creative thinking and hampers productivity in the modern workplace. Competitive Threat/Lack of Agility — With today’s fast-paced economy, businesses live and die based on 6 Hallmarks of their ability to be agile. As such, Collaborative communications and collaboration has Communications become a competitive differentiator. Companies that don’t do this well » Unified user experience will endanger their ability to pull for communicating together the best resources and and collaborating, act quickly enough to be effective in sharing content, and their markets. managing projects » Seamless experience Collaborative from one device type Communications to another To close the door on these dangers, » Team messaging as companies must streamline the central component modes of communications in » Voice, video, online use and embrace a culture of meetings, app integrations collaborative communications. also supported This isn’t just about unifying different modes of communication » Built on open, — although that’s foundational. intelligent cloud-based Collaborative communications is conversational platform about delivering that highly desired unified user experience and enabling » Enables greater agility a transformation in the way people and increased productivity communicate, collaborate, share content, and manage projects. A NEW ERA OF WORKPLACE COMMUNICATIONS: WILL YOU LEAD OR BE LEFT BEHIND? 4 It’s about an integrated experience across voice, video, online meetings, app integrations and more, with team messaging at the core — whether employees are using their mobile devices, sitting at their desktops, or gathered in meeting rooms. Ultimately, collaborative communications is about allowing greater agility and productivity across a far-flung workforce leveraging an open and intelligent cloud-based conversational platform that supports integrations, chatbots, and artificial intelligence. And, as businesses embrace the idea of collaborative communications, they must think beyond their corporate boundaries. With an open, intelligent cloud-based conversational platform, businesses can enable seamless experiences not only for internal teams but also teams comprising customers and partners. The idea of a collaborative communications platform resonates with employees, as evidenced by results from the CITE Research survey noted previously. In the survey, two-thirds of respondents said they felt having a single communications platform would lead to better workflow, improved productivity, reduced chaos, and easier remote working. Team Messaging: Core to the Future of the Digital Workplace With data points such as these, making a case for collaborative communications is easy. Collaborative communications gives enterprises the ability to deliver full collaborative capabilities on any device, from anywhere, via a group-centric communications platform. What’s more, collaborative communications places the emphasis on people, not technology. This means employees are better able to reach the right people in an organization at the right time and place, via the most appropriate mode of communications. Productivity improves, as does creative work. Team messaging is increasingly becoming the preferred way of enabling collaborative communications. This is particularly true among workers aged 18 to 44, with 43% of CITE Research respondents indicating that team messaging is their top mode of communications. It’s the least disruptive form of communications at work, they found, and most are likely to work with a team messaging app approximately 46 to 60 minutes a day. That team messaging is rising in importance within the enterprise is also borne out by results from the No Jitter 2018 Team Collaboration Survey. Consider these data points: • 90% of respondents indicated that employees within their enterprise organizations currently use one or more team messaging tools • 88% of all respondents said they anticipated a hike in the number of daily users within the next 12 months • More than 95% of respondents said team messaging apps are a necessary component of their future communications and collaboration strategies A NEW ERA OF WORKPLACE COMMUNICATIONS: WILL YOU LEAD OR BE LEFT BEHIND? 5 That last statistic is particularly revealing, especially when thinking back to how overwhelming knowledge workers consider the volume of communications to be — with email a particular bugaboo (in the CITE Research survey, 30% of U.S. respondents said they check email more than 20 times a day, and 25% of workers said they found email, along with unscheduled meetings and phone calls, a top disruption). According to the No Jitter survey, respondents believe team messaging apps could help with that overload. Nearly 50% of